1. Field
Embodiments of the invention relate to techniques for viewing mappings and nodes.
2. Description of the Related Art
Some conventional systems enable a user to map columns of one table to columns of another table (i.e., to form mappings between columns). A mapping may be described as a relationship between two objects. The mappings between columns that the user creates may be partitioned into one or more mapping groups based on some grouping criteria. It is possible for there to be a large number of mappings (e.g., in the hundreds) of columns. The mappings may be shown on a display screen of a computer monitor, for example, by illustrating the tables and their columns and drawing lines between mapped columns. Displaying the mappings on a typical display screen may be difficult. In particular, as the number of mappings increases, it may be difficult to illustrate all of the mappings on the workspace of the screen. This is a scalability of workspace issue. Workspace may be described as a portion of the screen that is used to perform a task or to display information related to one or more tasks. Some conventional systems enable a user to scroll (e.g., using a scroll bar) to different portions of the mappings because all of the mappings can not be displayed on the display screen at one time. When a large amount of data is involved the user must repeatedly scroll the data to find the desired information, which may be time consuming and which may not provide a clear indication of the mappings.
When the user is dealing with a large number of objects (e.g., tables, views, etc.) and a large number of columns per table, it may be difficult for the user to get a good sense of the progress that has been made in creating the mappings and it may be difficult to view the individual mappings (e.g., lines representing mappings (also referred to as mapping lines) may cross each other or go off the display screen). Additionally, display of many of the lines may not be needed at a given time, and the extra processing time required to draw these unneeded lines may adversely impact system performance in conventional systems.
Some conventional systems may use a flow chart approach to illustrate the mappings, but it is often difficult to see a large number of columns at once. Some conventional systems use a single view approach to illustrate the mappings. The single view approach may work well for a small number of mappings, but when a large number of mappings are involved, the information will not fit in the workspace, and the user has to scroll the workspace to find mappings of interest.
Some conventional systems provide a hierarchical structure (e.g., a tree type structure). It is very difficult to focus on, or even view, information of interest when a large amount of hierarchical or tree data is being displayed. Tree structures generally provide controls for collapsing and expanding nodes and their children, but even in their collapsed state, the nodes each occupy a row of space. Thus, some conventional systems provide hide/show functions by enabling a user to manually select each branch of the tree type structure that is to be further shown or hidden, but these functions may be tedious to use.
Some conventional systems allow the user to hide or collapse objects that they are not interested in. This may be very tedious if there are many objects (e.g., hundreds of tables) and the user only wants to view one or two of the objects. Also, some conventional systems allow the user to launch a separate dialog window and type in a filter to show desired objects. However, this requires the user to find common criteria within the limits of the filter for the objects to be shown, which may be difficult.
Thus, there is a need in the art for improved techniques for viewing mappings and nodes.